A Safe Harbor in Chaos: marginalities, insurance and security in the Luz region in São Paulo

Abstract

This project intends to investigate the relations between insurance, security and urban marginalities in the region of Luz, in the inner city of Sao Paulo. The frame of this research privileges, based on the ethnography, a relational approach that allows to contrast perspectives to think about the production and reproduction of the inequalities in the contemporary urban. The focus here is on the analytical profitability of field experiences in the studied territory, so disparate - from extreme poverty to extreme wealth. To this end, the present project will use ethnographic approaches both on the "margins" and on elites and "centers of power". These themes are usually dealt with separately in the bibliography. More specifically, this project aims to: i) contribute to a critical analysis of the categories of "center" and "margin" in anthropology as tools for understanding the state and social inequalities in the contemporary urban; (ii) to understand and analyze the connections between the notions of risk and security present in the insurance market in interaction with the marginal populations and territories, both as regards risk governance and the opening of new market niches.